VDOT Facilities Stocked With Salt, Sand In Preparation For Winter

NORTHERN VIRGINIA — The Virginia Department of Transportation’s facilities in Northern Virginia are fully stocked with salt, sand and brine as the department prepares to keep roads safe during the upcoming winter, VDOT officials said Wednesday morning during the department’s winter outlook presentation.

Meteorologists are saying that an El Niño climate pattern is strengthening and could last through next spring. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Northern Virginia and the D.C. area historically sees above-average snowfall during El Niño winters.

At Wednesday morning’s briefing, Lauren Mollerup, VDOT’s assistant district administrator and district maintenance engineer for Northern Virginia, said her district leans heavily on contractors for the equipment that does the pretreating of roads and snow removal. VDOT's Northern Virginia district includes Fairfax County, Arlington County, Loudoun County and Prince William County.

Decisions on whether to pretreat roads with salt or brine are typically made one to three days out from when the National Weather Service predicts a storm will hit. Whether to pretreat roads also depends on whether rain is in the forecast prior to the storm, which would wash away the treatment before the snow arrives, Mollerup said.

As part of a partnership with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, VDOT is also trying to be more conscious with the amount of a salt it uses on roads prior to winter storms, she noted. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, road salt can contaminate drinking water, kill or endanger wildlife, and increase soil erosion.

At Wednesday briefing, Chris Strong of the National Weather Service noted that last winter was the third-warmest on record and the region was only one small snowfall away from having a snowless winter.

This contrasts with two winters ago when a snowstorm stranded hundreds of motorists on Interstate 95 in Virginia, outside VDOT’s Northern Virginia region, with many motorists stuck in their cars for more than 24 hours.

Virginia transportation officials failed to implement lessons learned from previous storms before that early January 2022 storm shut down I-95, according to a report released in spring 2022 by the state inspector general.

Despite the nightmare of January 2022, Strong said the NWS has come a long way in the past 10 years in how it communicates with local transportation officials.

Winter storms can come in different forms and often “it’s the smaller ones that we need to be vigilant for,” he said.

Back in January 2011, a storm that dropped only 5 or 6 inches of snow and some sleet in the region caused traffic backups that forced people to abandon their cars. Known as Carmageddon, some motorists took 12 hours to get home during the 2011 storm for a commute that normally takes less than an hour.

Strong said snowfall in the D.C. area has been below average over the last three winters. At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, 13.7 inches of snow is the winter average for the D.C. area.

As for the El Niño, Strong said the climate pattern increases the odds for snow in the Mid-Atlantic region. But the snowfall amounts will depend on whether the slightly higher odds of higher-than-normal temperatures from El Niño turn the precipitation into rain, he said.

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